A very thoughtful piece by Sabine. My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a place for meaningful interaction between explorers at differe

A very thoughtful piece by Sabine. My advice to college freshmen is to consider universities as a place for meaningful interaction between explorers at different stages. The "learning" (curriculum) part is just a prerequisite done (mostly) all by yourself (through exercise) at your study desk. At the campus you show up prepared to be able to engage with the community (of peers, graduates, postgraduates, professors ...) as you climb up the ranks yourself. At its heart it is very much a social endeavor. But ime especially in physics or mathematics this is much less emphasized. Maybe understandably so in order to encourage working on a "simple" problem for weeks on end ("frustration tolerance") and not to cheat by consulting others immediately after a failed attempt without even trying the "deep dive" of carefully going through the reasoning. >During a decade of education, we physicists learn more than the tools of the trade; we also learn the walk and talk of the community, shared through countless seminars and conferences, meetings, lectures and papers. After exchanging a few sentences, we can tell if you’re one of us. You can’t fake our community slang any more than you can fake a local accent in a foreign country. My clients know so little about current research in physics, they aren’t even aware they’re in a foreign country. This also reminds me of the life of Alexander Grothendieck who after a decade of brilliant work ("Golden Age" in his 30's to 40's) in which he stayed in touch with the mathematical community through unsurmountable correspondence and singlehanendly spread a lot of remarkable seeds which later blossomed wonderfully in the field --- one day vehemently and visibly protested the military-industrial complex in France (because of his traumatic WWII experience), was left alone by his intimidated fellow academics (who were fearful to simply cut off a tremendous amount of funding resources) and then simply stopped engaging with the community all together and never in his later life found a way to come back in (despite his brilliant "track record") but instead grew more and more sour and frustrated becoming isolated, in the end even suffering from (mild) paranoid delusions while only a handful of people/acolytes kept him in touch with the outside world.